OWW 2: McCarthy and Frost

I’m traveling with the family this week, so it’s time for a second edition of Other Writers’ Words: phrases whose perfection causes me a bit of pain. There’s no particular hierarchy for these entries; they’re just bits that have stuck in my mind for whatever reason. I welcome any comments and suggestions.

McCarthy’s efficiency

The first is from Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” and describes a father and son riding “up through broken hills,” the father “thin and frail, lost in his clothes.” I think that’s a fine, efficient description, but contrast that with the description of the boy:

“The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.”

If the father’s description packed a whole state of being into a few shabby words, I think this lithe description of the boy says much by focusing, at least nominally, on a very specific part of his character: his grace while riding the horse. But McCarthy avoids descriptors; unlike the father’s “thin and frail” he says nothing about the particulars of what the boy looks like here; there are no descriptive adjectives to be found. Instead he emphasizes the fullness of that connection, and how the boy would not be complete without the animal. Rather than being born to horsemanship, the boy is born for it. By avoiding physical description he captures not only the physical grace but the metaphysical as well. The minimalist punctuation isn’t unique to this passage—it’s characteristic of McCarthy’s writing—but I think it works particularly well here. The whole thing glides out as though an uninterrupted thought, and the second sentence is a complex fragment, incomplete in itself.

Frost’s precision

The second example this week is cheating slightly because it’s from a poem, and any poem should be the purest possible distillation of an experience into words, even if those words won’t land for every reader. When reading a poem I’m often impressed that someone has said something so cleanly, but I also often don’t personally connect to what’s being said. This is equally true of the old rhyming couplet drudgery and a modern innovation like Aram Saroyan’s minimalist poem “lighght” (that’s the whole poem and it doesn’t really work for me).

But Robert Frost is a kind of bridge poet between 19th and 20th centuries. He uses old tools for modern ends; he has depths but his best-known poems operate on a shiny surface of recognizable meter and rhyme. I’m not conversant enough in contemporary poetry to say whether Frost has fallen out of fashion, inasmuch as any poet is fashionable now. But I can say that this type of poetry—regular meter, regular rhyme—is not trendy. It is, however, easy to remember and fun to read. Perhaps the decline of rhyme comes from a sort of snobbishness; I’m reminded of a recent article that snarks, “Any fool can enjoy an enjoyable thing, but only a committed intellectual can enjoy an unenjoyable one.” For whatever reason, Frost is probably the “serious modern poet” that the most people with no interest in poetry could name, if only because of two roads diverging in a yellow wood and miles to go before I sleep. I think Frost’s poetry looks more superficial than it is, but that’s just one poorly informed opinion.

In any case, this excerpt is from a poem about physical labor in the cold New England springtime, but it ascends into this introspective mission statement:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only when love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

I can only describe this passage as a dry stone wall: it exists if and only if every part of it is chosen and placed perfectly. I’m jealous that Frost recognized and then incorporated this counterbalanced swing between avocation and vocation (essentially, hobby and profession) to express his unity of purpose, this sense that everything one does contributes to the only identity that ultimately matters. Frost was writing in a register and a moment when sincerity could inspire a wide readership, without the need for ironic or fashionable distancing. Nowadays sincerity is certainly still available to writers, but it’s likely not the key to universal readership and acclaim. So part of the pain of that line, for me, is precisely that the avocation/vocation twinning was available to Frost in a way that seems to have disappeared. Or maybe it just seems like that right now.

That’s enough for now; may you appreciate all life’s joys.